Biden's plan for new normal spurs worries about next covid surge - and who is being left behind.
Cathy Colledge, who has Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, feels like she's on her own trying to avoid a coronavirus infection that might kill her.
The unsettling answer for Colledge is that her risk continues to be dangerously high because of her illness, even though transmission of the coronavirus has dropped significantly. That means she must now do a risk-benefit calculus for every journey outside of her home. But for many other Americans, there was palpable relief on Feb. 25, when the CDC shifted the vast majority of U.S.
But there are no distinct steps to a new pandemic normal, only judgment calls that will have to be continuously adjusted, depending on how an unpredictable virus mutates, said several senior administration officials and outside experts. "I'm especially concerned about what seems to me to be a high hospitalization threshold for triggering implementation of community measures like indoor masking," Jeffrey Duchin, health officer for Seattle and King County in Washington state, said in an email.Several experts heralded the new guidelines and said they were appropriate as cases drop, especially given the nation's broad immunity.
When CDC released the new metrics, Walensky said they could be dialed up or down if an evolving virus posed challenges. Agency officials implied, but did not state forcefully, that another large surge would mean a return to indoor mask recommendations. They wanted guidance from the CDC to help determine when mandates could be relaxed and when they might need to be reinstated, one senior administration official and two state health officials said. State officials said they asked that the capacity of their hospitals be included. These officials, along with others in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Implicit in the latest guidance is a basic fact that the country is "at the point where we're not able to prevent transmission from the virus from occurring," said Aubree Gordon, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. "The severity of infection has dropped. A huge part of that is because of population-level immunity. I do think it's appropriate guidance for the moment we are in now.
But some people are pessimistic the new metrics will alert communities in sufficient time to reinstate measures like indoor masking to avert surges. New hospital admissions lag infections by at least a week, and by that time, a community could have significant amounts of disease.
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